When Amy Sousa was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in April, she went into “icy cold panic” about whether doctors could shrink the 10-centimeter tumor in her right breast —or if she would need a mastectomy.
It’s a tragic, and ironic, place to be in for an activist who has spent the past five years warning young women about the “contagion” of transgender ideology and the celebratory trendiness of top surgery —having your breasts removed as part of gender-affirming care —on social media.
“Radical double mastectomies on girls are not a product of their so called ‘mental illness,’ they’re a product of social indoctrination,” Sousa, who holds a master’s degree in psychology, told The Post from her home in Port Townsend, Wash.
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“Kids are being disassociated from the realities of life and are being indoctrinated by publicity and marketing to think that surgery and lifelong drugs will make them happy.
“They’re being manipulated to turn something normally viewed as painful and serious to associate it instead with something to envy and with celebrity status.”
Now she’s using the pain and fear triggered by trying to save her cancerous breast from amputation to shine even more of a light on what she sees as sharp rise in the glamorization and marketing of top srugery for biological females who don’t identify as women or are transitioning to men.
In an essay on The Known Heretic Substack which she authors, Sousa, 48, wrote: “My battle with breast cancer is giving me a fresh lens through which to view transgender propaganda, marketing, and so-called ‘gender-affirming care.’”
Young people ages 13 to 17 are the biggest group that identify as transgender in the US — around 1.4% of the age group, or about 300,000 of them, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA.
The overall number of Americans undergoing gender-affirming surgery is on the rise, research in 2023 revealed, almost tripling between 2016 and 2019 alone.
Between 2018 and 2021, at least 776 mastectomieswere performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to data analysis based on insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures paid for out-of-pocket.
The sex reassignment surgery market was over $733 million in 2023and is projected to surpass $2 billion by 2032, according to the Global Market Insights research firm.
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Among the surgeons who specialize in “gender affirming surgery” are Dr. Dany Hanna of Frisco, Texas, who advertises “genital nullification,” and Dr. Siobhan Gallagher of Miami who popularized the phrase “yeet the tee*ts” — slang for removing breasts — and has nicknamed herself “Dr. Teetus Deletus.”
Gallagher, who is originally from Ireland, has said she does more than 500 gender-affirmation surgeries a year, some of them to teens under 18.
She was reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2022 for using her enormous social media platforms “to appeal to hundreds of thousands of underage social media users, advertise Gallagher’s ‘gender affirming’ plastic surgery services, and sell them to a vulnerable and impressionable population of children and youth experiencing distress with their gender identity and developing bodies.”
“Just realized I only get to yeet 4 tee*ts next week,” Gallagher posted to Instagram atop a selfie of her looking sad.
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Her account includes many post-op photos of patients celebrating as well as photos of things like artificial testicl* implants and breezy videos like one which starts: “Let’s talk about nipples falling off (post-surgery) really quick.”
And it’s not just Gallagher. Instagram and TikTok are replete with videos of “Yeet the Teet” parties commemorating voluntary mastectomies, as well as users who post photos of their bandaged chests and talk about still being drugged up on morphine.
“Ya (trans) boy is getting top surgery tomorrow! Time to yeet those tee*ts,” wrote one poster on Reddit as commenters cheered.
“Chesticles to da recepticles! wrote one.
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“Boobye!”
“Misty-colored mammaries!”
“I just imagined them launching off your chest like twin space shuttles,” wrote another. “I can’t stop laughing.”
Earlier this year, celebrity makeup artist Gottmik, the first trans man to appear on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” celebrated her double mastectomy on the show — walking the runway in a green latex skirt with disembodied fake arms embracing her and brandishing a scalpel next to “bloody” scars on her chest.
Gottmik — who was born a woman and transitioned to a man, uses she/her pronouns in drag and he/him when not, according to The Advocate — also carried a clear biohazard bag containing fake, bloody breasts.
On TikTok, a popular meme trend show post-op trans mastectomy patients shouting at the camera, “Holy sh-t, I’ve just had a transgender operation!”
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“If you go on GoFundMe right now, there are so many girls trying to get their top surgery,” Sousa said. “It’s incredibly disturbing. These girls are mimicking each other. They’re following each other. And they’re creating this as a trend. I see this as a social contagion.
“They’re in the hospital after these radical double amputations, smiling and posting pictures while they’re showing their followers their chests that are still leaking blood,” Sousa added. “But if you go to a cancer site and look at the women who have gotten a double mastectomy because of cancer, you’ll see a much different look on their faces. They’re talking about how hard the recovery is and how they can’t lift anything and how much pain they’re in.”
Sousa, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and once planned a life in the theater, has long lobbied for women and girls to have access to single sex spaces in sports
A turning point in her activism came in 2018, while attending women’s marches and other so-called “puss* Hat” events. She encountered what she described as about five “men who called themselves women” on a web site who were accusing her and others of transphobia because of the use of the “puss* hat” phrase.
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“I remembered I asked one of them is it transphobic to talk about my vagin*, and he said yes,” Sousa recalled.
Sousa said the group doxxed her online, giving out her past addresses and her father’s phone number.
“I was genuinely scared,” Sousa said. “I thought I was just arguing with a bunch of jerks but when I did more research I saw how many women were being silenced by these [trans men].”
Sousa started her Known Heretic brand on X at that point and her substack shortly thereafter. She’s organized multiple protests against biological men in women’s sports and against child gender clinics in Seattle and against housing biological in women’s prisons.
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But now her hardest fight is to regain her own health.
“Amy is battling to save her own life,” her close friend K Yang, a former LGBT non-profit coordinator turned anti-trans and anti-woke whistleblower, told The Post.
“I have witnessed her journey through breast cancer and treatment with shock and awe at the grace and dignity she has carried herself with. Amy’s inspiring women all around the world to stand up for themselves and find courage to openly resist the destruction of women’s rights in the name of trans and gender ideology.”
Since April, Sousa’s tumor has reduced from 10 centimeter to 2.5 centimeters with chemo and a strict Paleo keto diet.
“I hope that I’ll be able to save my breast and keep my body intact and whole,” Sousa said. “But if my breast has to be removed, it won’t be because I didn’t try everything.”
Dr. Gallagher and Dr. Hanna did not return phone calls from The Post.
